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July 2, 2009

Measuring your success as a writer

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For the last few weeks, I have been discussing how the art of writing intersects with commercial success. First I said that it’s already hard to write, but even harder when you choose your genre solely based on what you think will sell, rather than what you love. Then I pointed out that most writers don’t make a lot of money from writing anyway. And then I used actor Marcus Graham to prove that you’ll be happier if you moderate your ambitions to something realistic.

In all of this, how do you measure your success as a writer? Using how much money you make, as I’ve tried to make plain, is a poor measure. Using the number of sales is only slightly better, because it’s still directly correlated to how much money you’re making. There’s plenty of writers who have released a decent body of work, with large mainstream publishers, have had sales, and who still cannot give up the day job.

For example, there’s Tony Shilltoe, an Australian fantasy author who has “enjoyed moderate publishing success” with more than a dozen books, and who still cannot give up the day job (though maybe he doesn’t want to). The key point for him is that he has not broken out of Australia into overseas (the giant US and UK markets).

I cannot speak for this writer and how he feels about it; I’m just using him as an example – a writer who has, at least since 2002, produced one to two publishable books a year – and that’s pretty impressive for someone with a fulltime job.

So how would you measure your success? Measuring it by money will only make you unhappy. Choose other measures, and make them correspond to where you are in your writing life.

If you’re just starting out, your measure of success could be twofold: Do you sit down and write every day? And are you able to complete an entire book-length story? Plenty of ‘writers’ undertake lots of stories and never have the willpower to work through the mid-book grind to finish a complete draft, so you can be proud if you have.

If you’re further along, you might make your measure of success whether you write a certain number of words every day, and whether you go back and edit that first draft until it becomes something better.

And again, you might be further along than that, and measure your success in publishing credits – with small publishers or large, with short stories or longer works, with fiction or non-fiction. Or it might by awards and good reviews (though that is relying on external factors and opinion and I would not recommend it – other peoples’ opinions matter in terms of deciding if your work should be published or not, but they should not be used to determine how you feel about it). Your goals depend on you.

My measure of success is simple, but less quantifiable: Am I happy? Do I look forward to my day? Do I go eagerly once more unto the writing breach, dear friends (even when I “close the wall up with our dead English” words; ie when it’s not going well)? Yes. Then I am successful.

 

July 1, 2009

Editing masterclass

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Last week, we finished off the prologue. I did intend to re-write the prologue with the changes I have specified, and post it for your edification, but I haven’t got around to that yet. So let’s just move straight into the body of the book.

Remember, the first half (before the execution) is from Ro’s point of view. The second half (after the execution) is from his daughter’s point of view. Ro dies. The reader should be very clear on that. There is no ‘hey, we swapped the bodies’ nonsense, he dies.

Ro Manus rode back to the City of Brass almost one year after he had left it to go south, further even than the Citadel of the Dog-Headed, which was now just a jackal-haunted ruin.

As his caravan came out of the foothills to the east and entered the Forest of the Dead which sprawled now for long miles on either side of the main road, he left the train of camels to his eminently capable assistant and the full complement of guards, and walked through the forest northwards, but not as far as the river.

Plenty of new trees, he noted, but not unduly many for a full turn of the seasons. He reached that section of forest where all the trees, hundreds upon hundreds, were of a height and crowded close together.

Ro pushed his way through the trees. He was ashamed that he would not have found the right tree if not for the unmistakable landmark of the tight circle of seven trees that stood just that much taller than the rest.

He knelt before his tree, kissed the soft mulched soil and breathed the words of a prayer meant to be chanted. He sat back on his heels and looked up at the tall silvery trunk and dry green leaves of the tree. Beyond its crown, the eternal sky sought to crush him. He looked down again.

‘Has it been this long?’ he asked. ‘It was yesterday, my love.’

In saying it, he had a spasm of guilt and closed his eyes. His thoughts had already turned ahead to the City of Brass, to Ninevah whom he saw as frequently as he visited this tree – once yearly.

With his eyes closed, Ro clearly saw this slope as it had been fifteen years ago. Women clad all in black, from head to wrist to toe, and even their hands and fingernails gone black with soil and ash. Some wept, but many did not. They buried their husbands, their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, even their cousins and nieces and nephews if the extended family had no other woman surviving to do it. Only the men who had no female relatives to do this task, like Ro, ventured the Forest of the Dead, and he had been the only man on that slope.

He had not chosen his place wisely, for his single tree. Beside him, a woman, tears falling into each hole, mixed ashes and soil for seven trees, seven. Ro had no words to say to that, and could not find the way or will to prevent her as she dug her holes and planted her trees in a circle she formed the centre of.

Now those seven trees grew just a little taller than the trees around them, and Ro was never at all curious, each year he visited, to peer between their trunks and see what he might see.

But the plague had passed, as all curses of the gods passed eventually, and the City of Brass had not yet seen a recurrence. It would eventually, Ro knew, traveller who had seen other cities come under the blight time and time again.

First, the name has to change – not through any fault of Ro’s but I used the name in another book before I got around to start editing this one, and I prefer it over there in the other one. So first step, change the name.

Secondly, the tone is wrong. It’s a bit formal or stilted or whatever, and I pretty quickly relax from that (as I noticed in my first comple re-read through before I started this editing process).

Thirdly, as an opening to a book, it’s probably a little too meandering. OK, so we find out that he’s returning from a successful trading year, had a wife, she died in the plague, and he has a thing for another woman now. We also learn something of the customs of the City of Brass (that they mark their dead by planting trees).

You know what would be better? We find out later that the Shah, the king of the city, is planning to plough under these trees because the city needs room to grow. (A lot of the time, Ro spends his time wondering if the Shah is actually a tyrant, or just extremely practical; that’s why he vacillitates about whether or not to join the people planning to overthrow him, and why he doesn’t pick a side – which in turn is why he kind of deserves what he gets. No place for fence-sitters in this world!) So, wouldn’t it be better if the trees are already ploughed under? If Ro comes home to bare earth where his wife’s grave once was? That would be better.

I don’t know if that image of the woman surrounding herself with her dead should stay. Maybe it can be slotted in somewhere else later.

Remember I was writing this for NaNoWriMo, so there’s going to be scenes that I lovingly dwell on, just to get my daily word count up. I think this was one of these scenes and it needs to be much shorter and with more stuff happening in it rather than remembrances that amount to backstory.

Writers often start the story too early, and I think this is one of those times. The huge benefit of putting distance between yourself and one of your stories is that you are more able to look at a patch of writing, even a patch that you’re fond of, and say – that is unnecessary. Delete it.

Next week, the next page…

 

June 25, 2009

Marcus Graham agrees with me

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , |
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I love Elvis…um, Marcus Graham.

In this article, Graham talks about his career trajectory. In particular, and in relation to my last few weeks of posts, the article begins:

MARCUS GRAHAM tells a funny story about the moment, many years ago now, when he gave up on Hollywood. It meant, as for any actor, letting go of a big dream and, like any adult, discovering that the dream wasn’t what you thought it would be. But in that pivotal moment in Graham’s life, he grasped the seeds of something else.

“I’ve learned that the less the ambition, the greater the happiness,” Graham says cheerfully.

And then later: “Letting go of the blind ambition of his 20s and 30s made him happier and calmer.”

Life today creates strange pressures: it’s not admirable anymore to just be quietly good at something that you’ve worked away at for years. You have to be the best! And do it really young! And really quickly! In writing, that’s first-time authors winning the Booker or 16-year-olds writing bestselling fantasy novels that get made into movies and spawn lots of sequels (though, hey, it is fantasy, so there’s got to be at least three books).

It leads to expectations that work against new writers. They expect too much of themselves, too quickly, and too much of the publishing industry, and others expect too much of them too. Something like Harry Potter or Twilight….those are bolts of lightning. Those authors themselves were under pressure to re-create the phenomena with every new book. How can a new author expect to create the next phenomenon when it is unpredictable, crowd-driven, faddish? How can a literary author aim to win the Booker when the judges’ tastes change every year and their decision-making is often obscure and apparently random?

Becoming an A-list movie star in Hollywood is the pinnacle for many actors. Wanting to be the next Rowling appears to be the goal for many fantasy writers. Winning the Booker is the dream for many (British Commonwealth and Irish) literary writers. Those are the sorts of big and glorious ambitions that might set you on your path, whatever it might be.

But to paraphrase the article, the dream is not always what you thought it was going to be. The amount of publicity, pressure, and sheer fan obsession must have given Rowling cold sweats. In this discussion, a Booker prize winner complains of having no time to write because of the touring expected of her since she won. And Marcus Graham woke up in Hollywood one day, and thought:

‘Bloody hell, here I am getting paid all this money to not work, while I wait for a job that I actually don’t want. What the f— am I doing here?’ So I took the $US10,000; they decided I actually was too mysterious [for a show called Mysterious Ways] and I left town.”

But: “despite letting go of ego, he still has the drive to act.” A writer can let go of unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune, and still want to write and be motivated to sit down and write (rather than daydream about having already written and receiving the accolades). It’s about deciding on workable goals, realistic goals.

For me, it’s regular publication for a small, niche audience. I don’t want lots of money, I sure as hell do not want fame, I don’t need critical recognition in the form of awards and prizes. I want to say, here, here’s a fun book, hope you enjoy it (and I want my small audience to say, thanks, I did, when’s the next one coming out? Write faster, lady).

We’ve all been trained to think of sensible, achievable goals as giving up. It’s not. It’s reaching for the happiness, the satisfaction, the contentment within your grasp, not those fabled distant stars that are so far away that their light takes millions of years to reach us. Reach for the Sun instead; its light only takes 8.3 minutes – a star less daunting to reach for.

There’s a greeting card in that, somewhere.

 

June 24, 2009

Editing masterclass

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Last time, I decided it would be cleaner to keep out some backstory details to keep the focus of the scene on the execution.

The rest of the prologue introduces characters and relationships:

Such was the crime, and the Shah had come to watch the punishment carried out, standing elevated at the execution gate with the Shah Consort at his side. The Shah Prince was, as ever, not in evidence.

Also in the silent audience as the camel was led on its display around the City of Brass was a true Consort, wearing the red leather and carrying the small silver dagger. Even without the stories she might have excited notice, with her black rich hair curled about her face, and her eyes of the gazelle.

But, the stories said, Ro Manus had handed her a full golden cup of vinegar-and-pearl in the instant before his arrest. It had happened only once in all the history of the Consorts in the City of Brass, and that had also been a dying man to his lover. The half-cup happened a good deal more frequently, that which was an offer of marriage, but even that was still accounted rare.

But the full cup gave everything the man owned to the Consort for a single night of her company, and that simple gesture from Ro, if he had really done it and the thunderous faces of the Shah and his Shah Consort hinted he had, took everything of his that might have been confiscated on his arrest as a traitor, and put it into the hands of the Consort.

That included the secret of making paper, which Ro had brought back with him from his latest journey. And it included the last great artwork of old Nabadiah, whose daughter and apprentice had escaped the Citadel of the Dog-Headed with it, and given it to their son, whose vinegar-and-pearl drink had gifted it to the Consort. The Consort wearing red leather amongst the crowd was the richest woman in the City of Brass.

But she left the square when the camel did, and did not return. The young girl in the white robe of the Scribes watched her go. They said she was Ro’s daughter and she had his colouring but Ro had never acknowledged her and his vinegar-and-pearl gift left nothing for her even if he had. She stayed in the square, waiting like the rest of them for the return of the white camel and its agonised passenger.

Beside the Shah and the Shah Consort waited the Lady Physician to the Shah Court She wore the yellow of her profession. Her eyes marked the departure of the Consort and the stillness of the young Scribe but she said nothing.

Normally the cries and jeers of the citizens would have signalled the progress of the camel along the circular streets of the City of Brass, but the crowd at the execution gate waited in the heat of the early morning sun and heard nothing. The rest of the city mourned as they did.

But when the camel at long last returned via the third bridge to the execution gate, a great cry when up from the crowd nearest the beast. For Ro Manus, who had taken all that had befallen him in stoic silence, lay with his head slumped upon the back of the camel. The breaker of ties had claimed him, said the crowd, dead mercifully and spared the indignity of dismemberment.

The Lady Physician of the Shah Court fought her way down from the dais and through the crowd until she reached the white camel. She confirmed what the crowd already knew, and turned and shook her head at the Shah. The man was dead, that signal said. Leave him be.

But the Shah must have his revenge, and the body was duly torn apart and beheaded. That too, the City of Brass witnessed. Then the tide changed and the City went on as it always did.

But the young scribe, her white robes muddied with the water and soil as she planted a karri sapling in the Forest of the Dead for her father days later, knew only that he had died intact and with his own personal honour.

She had none of his ashes to mix with the soil as she planted his tree among the stumps of other karri, but here, with no witnesses under the enormous sky, she let tears mingle with it instead.

Now the execution’s being told from the point of view of an attendee, some of this information logically can’t be put in, as he wouldn’t know it or have the opportunity to observe it. And some, as before, needs to be removed to make the execution scene cleaner and more gripping. I find, re-reading this prologue, that it has a very distancing effect, a very poor effect indeed for something meant to draw a reader in. In re-writing, I will be looking for something with more flavour and impact.

 

June 18, 2009

It Ain’t A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

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Continuing on from last week’s entry, I thought I’d address some major misconceptions for people who are specifically setting out to make money from writing fiction.

People are misled by the big popular books. They look at the mega-seller of the year, whether it’s a Harry Potter or a Da Vinci Code or a Twilight and that’s what they expect for their own book – and they often think it’ll be easy enough to write one to boot.

Writing is hard. Writing a publishable book is even harder. Actually getting it published is like winning the lotto (me to a friend: and maybe I’ll get published, hah hah. Friend to me: and maybe I’ll win lotto, hah hah. True, yes. Supportive, not quite).

And getting it published and then having it go on to not only out-earn its advance, if you even get one, but to sell several million copies? I don’t even have words for how rare that is. Well, OK, it’s like being hit by a meteorite.

Consider this. Crime writer (and writer on The Wire) George Pelecanos said in an interview last year in the Guardian’s Observer Magazine that he was paid $2500 for his first book and not much more for the second; for the sixth book, he got $7500. Only then did he get a two-book deal for $90,000.

So he had to write six books with low advances, and then he had to write two more to get what amounts to a yearly salary per book.

That’s eight books – eight books that sell enough to keep your publisher happy – before you can even think about quitting your day job. And most B-writers, even with lots of books out, still have to have outside work to maintain themselves. That’s why you can’t measure your success by how much you earn.

By all means, have lofty goals, aim high, reach for the stars. First-time authors hit it big sometimes. Long-time authors hit it big slightly more frequently. It does happen. But it doesn’t happen often.

And not only do most writers not ‘get rich’, it certainly isn’t ‘quick’, even putting aside the need to write many books. If you’re staring down the barrel of mortgage payments or imminent retrenchment, sitting down to write a bestseller is not going to solve things for you.

Let’s assume you are after all the next Dan Brown and that you’re a NaNoWriMo veteran and knock up your MS in a month. It still has to go through the whole submissions process (months in a queue) and, once accepted, publishing (editing, formatting, layout, proofs) process. Likely you won’t see any money from the thing for a good year or more after you’ve typed the final full stop.

I would say most authors who move on from writing as a hobby to wanting to see their work published daydream, even a little, about having a bestseller. That’s OK. And it’s OK to want it and to work towards it – it’ll impel your writing and, especially, marketing efforts.

Even optimistically expecting it to happen can be self-affirming and motivating to the personality type who thrives on eternal positive thinking. Though, having read Enough by John Naish, I think this approach is dangerous and will lead to discontent and unhappiness, personally.

But to rely on it? And to write solely for that purpose? I think most attempts at that fizzle. I don’t think it can be sustained in the face of the realities of the publishing business.

Unless you’re a celebrity already. Then it’s a Get-Richer-Quicker Scheme.

 

June 11, 2009

Writing for commercial success: love or money and why can’t it be and?

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The February 2009 issue of Good Reading Magazine had an interview with author Margo Lanagan, who has since won a Ditmar for her novel Tender Morsels.

She had this to say about commercial success, or her relative lack of it:

I’d done five of my own books and I still didn’t have any money from the thing. I couldn’t see how I was going to get to the stage where I could give up my day job, and I thought ‘I really need to find a genre that’s going to travel overseas; Australia is just too small’.”

With its huge market reach in the US and the UK, and relative lack of localised content, fantasy fiction seemed the obvious choice. And so she set out to create (in the tradition of the genre), her very own fantasy trilogy. Unfortunately, all did not go as planned. For three years she attempted to construct this epic, but she couldn’t maintain control of the narrative and so kept hitting dead ends.

I believe her early works were short story collections (which rarely sell well now) and YA novels, while the acclaimed and award-winning Tender Morsels is literary fantasy (which means I will be very sure to seek it out).

I find the quote interesting because it illustrates one of the difficulties of writing: if you pick a genre to write in solely because you think it will sell, rather than because it’s what you enjoy, you will often have trouble writing something decent. This is for a number of reasons:

    1. You will not know the genre. The classic presumption that many people make is that certain genres – coughromancecough – are easy to write because they follow a formula. The presumption could not be more wrong. Every genre has its traditions and expectations and even if you’re going to break them, you have to know them first.
    2. You won’t really be enjoying yourself. Your heart won’t be in it, and you’ll run into the same kind of narrative issues Lanagan discusses above.
    3. Not even publishers and booksellers know what will be a commercial success – I refer you to the article I linked to earlier “93 percent of traditionally published books sell only 1,000 copies”.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t writers out there who don’t perfectly well manage to write in whatever genre necessary for them to sell books. But in general, the best way to approach commercial success seems to be to choose a genre you like and know, and then work within that to produce books you think will have mainstream appeal, based on research into current or emerging tastes and trends.

As an anecdotal example, I once read (on a messageboard from an unknown contributor, so caveat emptor) that George RR Martin deliberately set out to write a bestselling fantasy series by asking fantasy fans what they liked and did not about popular series like the Jordon Wheel of Time books (You know what we don’t like, Martin? Writers who stop halfway through).

And that obviously worked for him, because Song of Ice and Fire has done amazingly well (except for the, you know, stopping halfway through – which maybe just illustrates the point about following your heart, not your hip pocket). So, my advice to those seeking commercial success would be to do your research – but start with what you love.

Now, as I have said before, I personally do not think aiming for commercial success is necessarily the best path to take. I do not write for or even aspire to commercial success; I have long-since accepted that I am not a mainstream writer. I should probably point out that I’m not literary/highbrow either, since that’s usually taken as the opposite of mainstream. I’m just me (I take a little of Montaigne’s philosophy of being satisfied with what you are instead of stressing yourself to become what you are not).

Because of my philosophy, I like the upshot of the interview with Lanagan:

casting aside any hope of financial reward, she now wrote as pure escape for herself…this collection of short stories received critical acclaim and lots of awards…

Slightly damaging to my point, the collection still didn’t sell well – short stories, don’t, remember – but she has now published the award-winning Tender Morsels which is published internationally rather than just in Australia, so she’s getting there. Hooray for writing for pleasure not profit!

Anyone with a creative hobby knows the tension between enjoying it for its own sake and making money from it. And unfortunately, some people, both writers and buyers of writing, appear to have taken the common writerly refrain of “I enjoy it so much, I’d do it even if I wasn’t being paid for it” as an excuse as to why writers don’t need decent renumeration (or copyright protection, apparently).

The upshot is all writers need to find their own balance between love and money. I’ve found mine, blockbuster writers find theirs, you will find yours (and let’s hope in every case it’s love and money).

 

June 10, 2009

Editing masterclass

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Last time, I looked at a paragraph in the prologue and decided it could be made cleaner by splitting into several parts, and have more of an impact by not distancing the reader so much from the man about to die.

Let’s look at the next bit of the prologue. Now we do get to meet Ro and get a little of his backstory:

Normally such a display was street entertainment, competing with the fire-eaters and shadow players, dancers and wrestlers, fortune-tellers and beggars. Lollipops in the form of a crucified man were hawked along the route of the display.

Not this morning. Ro Manus was of foreign birth to the City but his parents who had settled here had died as heroes in the battle against the Citadel of the Dog-Headed, and he himself, former captain of the Shah’s elite guard and enterprising, industrious, honest merchant, had been well-spoken off and popular.

That he had allied himself against the Shah with the Fox Splinter was not widely disbelieved, and yet it did not seem justification for his fate. He had been hung in the crucifixion pose on his own camel, but he would not die there. The Shah had decreed Ro Manus would be torn apart limb from limb with rare horses from the Shah’s own stable, and then his head would be severed from his bleeding torn torso with a blunt blade.

Here, I remember, I was trying to first introduce the notion that the city, too, would be a character, formed by its mass of inhabitants, as well as introduce Ro himself and his final fate.

However, I don’t think all these backstory details are necessary here (remembering too that the prologue will be re-written into the first-person POV of the man who leads the condemned to the executioner). They’re not compelling enough to keep the reader’s attention while interrupting what is compelling: the execution. We can leave such details – why is he popular? what crime did he commit? – to the body of the book, and focus this prologue exclusively on what is taking place there and then.

Of course, in such a situation, you wouldn’t delete the unwanted text, you’d copy and paste it to a hold-file until you did want it.

 

May 28, 2009

Identifying writing scams

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New writers desperate to get published are easy prey for unscrupulous people who either accept work and somehow forget to pay, or who offer spurious services for outlandish prices, or who run poor-quality anthologies that take every submission and then charge contributors a huge amount to buy copies for themselves and their friends (poetry.com is a classic example), or who run expensive contests with small prizes. Some are easy to spot once you have a little experience; others are harder.

WritersWeekly’s Whispers and Warnings column is helpful in this regard, as is SFWA’s Writer Beware page.

However, it’s also useful to develop your own instinct for when something’s not right. A good rule of thumb is that you do not pay to be published (unles you’re self-publishing). Full stop. Do not pay to be published. A publisher should have enough faith in your work to take on the expenses, in the expectation of reaping profit from sales. If they’re charging you, it means they think there won’t be sales. Which then makes you wonder why they’re publishing the work – unless they make their money off you, not your work.

Let’s look at an example I came across the other day. I am in no way stating that this is a scam; however, I am saying that this has rung alarm bells for me and I personally wouldn’t submit to this market: iPulp Fiction.

The basic set-up is that you pay $10 to have your short story manuscript assessed by one of a list of readers: “We do not employ a large group of editors to read submissions. Instead, we use a network of independent readers who screen all stories and recommend the best to iPulp for final consideration. Manuscript readers are not employees of iPulp. They charge a reading fee of $10 per manuscript. That’s how they make a living. iPulp doesn’t make a cent through the submission process.”

This sounds fair enough. iPulp are able to consider many more manuscripts and keep their costs low by outsourcing what full-time editors used to do. You’re paying the readers directly, not iPulp itself, so how are they making money off you?

Here’s what rung alarm bells for me: There is no account given of how the readers are selected, and the readers do not supply any references or bibliographies to demonstrate what makes them experts in manuscript assessment. Their real names are given (in the addresses) so you could look them up to see if they’ve publicised their work experience or publications, but why not have it there on the site? How do we know these aren’t just friends or affiliates of iPulp, or in any way better able to pick a good story than anyone else?

I’m also not comfortable with this notion that iPulp have outsourced the submission process. They’re not making money directly off writers like the worst of the scam-artists; they are saving money on employees by contracting out one of the vital steps of publishing and making writers pay for it. If they had faith in their own set-up, why aren’t they paying the contractors?

For your $10, you get only either one step further in the submission process (ie iPulp will now actually read your work) or a rejection – there’s no critique for your money, and no guarantee that iPulp will accept the work once it has passed the reader. On the plus side, you only have to wait a month for a response (rather than months plural).

Lastly, iPulp offers a 40% royalty, which sounds good compared to traditional paper publishers, but is less than many ebook publishers.

These are the reasons I’m not comfortable with this market. Others may see no problem with it and find it sensible and easy; others may also baulk at some markets or contests I have submitted to in the past (some of which, too, I also shake my head at now). Each writer must make their own decisions.

For example, while I have a problem with this set-up, I have no problem with the $50 application fee the Hachette MS Development program is charging, though it’s hard to believe it really costs them anything near that much in admin fees for every single entry received. I couldn’t say why the $10 puts me off but the $50 doesn’t.

It’s a personal decision – but you can use the online resources given above to spot the most obvious, develop a sense of how their MO, and learn what rings your bells.

 

May 27, 2009

Editing masterclass

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OKay, so last time, I took a look at the first paragraph of my draft of ‘City of Brass’ and decided it would be clearer and more compelling if written in a first-person voice.

Therefore the rest of the edits for this chapter will be aimed at both improving it, and re-writing it to match the new voice.

The second paragraph describes what is being done to the condemned man:

There, in the square, watched silently on all sides, the soldiers tied his hands and feet to the pillory frame hung from the humps of a white camel, the man’s own camel, so he stretched spread-eagled, back arched beyond endurance. But he endured, as silent as the citizens who watched him. The camel, vicious thing, had had its mouth tied shut and the soldiers were careful of its feet as they worked. The soldiers, the Shah’s elite Janissary, all white-haired and of a height, escorted the beast out from the east gate, the execution gate, and led it through the wide cobbled circular main streets of the City of Brass.

Putting aside the need for the first person re-write, there are several other things to be done to improve this paragraph: one, it could be cleaner – there’s too much information, so it needs shortening and also splitting into several paragraphs.

Secondly, it fails to make any connection with the condemned man – who is, remember, the main character right up until he gets himself executed halfway through the book. But he’s tied to the camel and led out the gate without ever actually really being present except in the abstract.

The fact that this prologue will now be from the POV of the man leading the prisoner to his doom is helpful in that when I re-write it, I can in some way properly introduce the prisoner, have some interaction or at least some non-verbal exchange observed by the man holding his arm.

You see that the technique that I am using here is to try to stand back and look at the overall purpose of the paragraph. It’s more than assessing whether the sentences are run together in a sensible fashion, and more about assessing whether the reader is going to make that all-important connection with the characters.

 

May 7, 2009

How to accurately quote on work

Posted by Wendy under Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , , , |
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Freelance non-fiction and technical writers will often be asked by prospective employers to provide quotes on writing projects. This can be hard to do accurately, especially when you’re starting out, because you have to be able to estimate the time it will take to provide the service, which depends not only on how fast you work but on things like the complexity of the task, your familiarity with the material and how much research and interviewing you’ll have to do, additional requirements like layout or editing, and so on.

However, it is very important that you do learn how to do it accurately – if you over-estimate how many hours you need, your quote won’t be competitive and you might not get the job. If you under-estimate how many hours you need, you’ll end up doing part of the project for free (or having to go cap-in-hand to ask for more money, neither outcome being optimal).

I’ve already outlined a way to work out the hourly rate to charge. Now here’s some tips for how to provide an accurate quote.

1. As I said in that prior post, you need to get very good at estimating how long you take to do various types of tasks. The easiest way to do this is to make specific observations: note what time you start a task, and note when you finish it (pause for interruptions). Do this repeatedly for all the types of work you do, until you get an decent average reckoning. Keep an ongoing record so you can compare over time to see if your average remains accurate and/or if practice is making you faster.

2. Consider the resources that will be needed to complete the project. Is your employer providing these, or will you have to use up some of your hours in hunting them out and organising them? Add in hours to cover it.

3. Always look at the project properly. Even when you have worked with an employer repeatedly, do not trust their description of how much work the project will require. They may under-estimate the number of hours needed or forget to account for added complexities. As a simple example, quoting on laying out a document may sound like a low-hours proposition until you open the document and see that it contains 150 inserted pictures that the employer forgot to mention. Always, always, always take the time to properly review the project and its true requirements yourself before deciding on a quote.

4. Consider the minimum level of effort required to do a job. Very simple jobs may only take you a few hours – they earn a pittance and can be irritating to fit into a schedule and complete paperwork for (this often takes just as long as for major jobs that earn ten times as much). Many contractors have a minimum rate that they charge (”I don’t get out of bed for less than…”) that applies to all little jobs.

5. Account for all additional tasks. As with working out an hourly rate, you need to learn to tally up the incidental work required in completing a writing project outside the relatively standard tasks of researching, writing and revising. This may include such simple but time-consuming things as setting up a template or file structure, going back and forth with the employer to clarify requirements, or scanning and taking photographs.

6. Clearly specify for which services your quote is valid for. Nothing sneakier than the employers who like to add in a few extra tasks once you’ve quoted and got underway. It’s not necessarily intentional, but such little ‘by the ways’ do add up. You can specify that you weren’t hired to do that task, provide a separate quote and receive explicit approval, or vary your original quote, again with explicit approval for the variation.

7. Unless you’re in a very tight competitive market, build in a little leeway to the quote. I often add 10% just to give me breathing space in case I misjudged. This might not be practical in all situations.

If, halfway through a project, you realise you did not allow enough hours to finish it, you have several options. Firstly, you can work faster so that you get it done within the rate you quoted. Quotes do have a funny way of dictating how many hours you end up spending on a project…

Secondly, you can ask to vary the quote. The best way to do this is to clearly and calmly list out the factors that require the additional hours/money. With any luck, you will be able to point out complexities or extras that the employer did not mention when they laid out the project for quoting. This doesn’t always work, and it may depend on how many projects you’ve done with the employer.

And lastly, you can suck it up and do the project for the price you quoted even if it cuts down your hourly rate, and write it off as a learning experience. It’ll probably only ever happen once, if you’re a fast learner…

 

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